


like a shot in the night

by CaughtAGhost



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Homophobia, Illnesses, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Self-Hatred, Steve is broke, Suicide, Tony is 23, Veteran Howard Stark
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-24
Packaged: 2019-03-06 03:50:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13402848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaughtAGhost/pseuds/CaughtAGhost
Summary: Howard Stark spends the end of his life delusional and paranoid, holed up in the skeleton of his old house, arms full of his old war relics behind a triple locked door. Tony, his waste-of-breath 23 year old son, has dropped out of college and moved back home, to take care of his father in the shadow of looming New England pines and the echo of the distant church bells.When Howard dies, the house is as good as a tomb. Except for the bug-eyed, bird-boned freak of a neighbor that keeps popping up in Tony's life.Who understands something about kindness that Tony doesn't. Who sees something better in the world that Tony doesn't. He paints and he paints and Tony never understands what's in his head that's so important to immortalize on canvas.





	1. Chapter 1

When Tony’s dad dies, his house is all that stands to mark that he ever existed in the first place. It’s more like a tomb than a grave, all cavernous halls and a windowless bedroom, an attic full of dust and bleached, afternoon sunlight. It was considered a mansion, back in its day, more rooms and cold fireplaces than their pathetic little family ever used, but the money dried up and Howard dried up and it’s just a step from being condemned. If the air ever moved in the stagnant little dead end drive in which the place is nestled, wind would whistle between the cracks in the roof, between the panels of the walls. Instead, nothing moves. It settles into its own foundation like a man dying in his own grave, and the only trace of life that remains is the patch of weeds that push between the slats of the steps of the ricky front porch.

Naturally, it’s Tony’s fault. His fault that Howard died, that is. He was stupid to think he could step away, stupid and selfish to think he could take a night off. He  lives lived with him as a caretaker, early dementia and a bad old case of PTSD. Some other stuff. 

It seems that the second Tony pulled out of the driveway, Howard put a pistol in his mouth. It was a hell of a sight to come back to, first thing the next morning. Thing is, for a second, Tony hadn’t even noticed that something was wrong. He remembers the moment clearer than crystal, immortalized in his memory by shock. Unlocked the three paranoid locks on the front door and came inside with a greasy paper bag of McDonalds breakfast— two egg muffins with jam, that’s what Howard  likes liked— and grunting, “Morning,” to the corpse of his father, feet kicked up in his lazy chair with a hole in the back of his head and blood glueing him to the upholstery. 

Amendment:

Howard did not put a pistol in his mouth the moment Tony pulled out of the driveway, because the blood is still sticky fresh when Tony walks in and there aren’t flies and that means if Tony hadn’t been slow and lazy and hungover, he probably would have showed up before Howard pulled the trigger.

Tony’s fault.

Needless to say, the egg muffins went straight into the trash.

Now Howard resides snug in a plain urn that Tony places on the mantle beside the dusty old war medals that he loathed so much. Always insisted he wasn’t a hero, but always resented that he didn’t die a hero’s death. Tony used to resent _him_ for talking like that, talking about wishing he went down in the war. Tony would’ve grown up without a dad, probably. When Obadiah took over the business, Tony probably would’ve been stuck in his care, probably, and never would’ve remembered much about Howard.

Now, Tony almost wishes that was the way things went.

But it goes like this: Tony puts his dad on a shelf, an old war relic. Then he brings the lazy chair, hastily covered over with a sheet, into the back yard and drenches it in lighter fluid without ever uncovering it to see the shape of the black stain his dad’s brains left on the cushion. It goes up in flames and Tony watches the fire with a beer in hand and he doesn’t feel anything but the creep of guilt.

Not like he _feels_ guilty. More like he can tell that it’s coming, probably with all the rest of his feelings, because he’s pretty sure he’ll feel something some time, but right now, nothing. The light of the flame casts dramatic shadows on the hill at the other side of the wrought iron fence that encloses the property. Jumping shadows like ghosts, flashing and disappearing, dancing just out of the corner of his eye.

“Having a bonfire?” comes a voice on the other side of the fence. Tony almost drops his bottle. He can’t see a face to connect with the sound until he squints and sees a pair of eyes and a messy head of blonde hair peering over gate, overgrown with ivy. 

“What the fuck.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean to spook you.” The owner of the voice stands an inch or so taller, as if having gone up on tip-toes. He must be short, the fence isn’t very high. Tony can’t see well through the thick haze of the smoke. “I’m new to the neighborhood. I was going to knock on your door but then I saw that you’re having a recreational fire. I, bread.”

Tony blinks. He’s still so out of it on shock and liquor from the past few nightmarish days that he isn’t sure if this is real. “You. . . bread?” he repeats slowly, deadpan.

“I mean, I made bread. To greet my neighbors. But it seems that it’s mostly just you,” he says. Tony stares and a long silence stretches between them, no words, just the crackling of the burning piece of furniture spitting sparks into the darkening sky. “I’m going to come around the gate, if that’s alright?”

Is this even real? He says nothing for even longer, and then bread-guy tilts his head, preparing to speak again. Tony breaks the quiet.

“Fuck off,” he says. He takes a swig of beer and throws the bottle onto the flames. He doesn’t check to see if the bread-guy has gone because he hears the creak of the gate as he steps away from it. 

“Right,” he says, voice almost perplexed. As if he’s never been told to fuck off before. As if he doesn’t know quite exactly what Tony meant by that. “Well, have a nice evening. The stars are supposed to be phenomenal tonight.”

Tony doesn’t look at the stars. His eyes stay on the ground for hours until the last smoldering coals breathe a final breath of gray smoke against the pale dawn.

 

*

 

Obadiah calls, three days after Tony has Howard cremated. He’s surprised it took him this long. Tony wakes from turbulent sleep with a snap, bolting upright with bile in the back of his throat, fumbling around in the bed for wherever he left his phone laying around. It rings somewhere unseen and Tony feels like he’s going to lose his mind because it’s too loud, it’s too much, it’s too close and he can’t fucking _find it—_

Until his hand closes around it beneath the sheets and he stabs his finger at the button and puts it shakily to his ear. He doesn’t even register the caller ID in his panicked, half asleep haze, but he recognizes the voice as soon as he hears it.

“Hullo?” Tony says.

“Tony?” Obadiah replies. “Did I wake you?”

Tony glances around, looking for the time before he decides that 3 PM is not an appropriate time for him to have still been asleep, so he lies, “No, I’m up. Just distracted,” he says, forcing a little more life into his voice.

“Oh, good. Of course,” Obadiah says. The line goes quiet and Tony can hear cars or something, in the background, on Obadiah’s end. Tony knows it’s on Obadiah’s end and not just people driving by outside the house because he lives at the end of a dead-end drive so no one drives by here. The street ends abruptly and there isn’t barely even room to turn a car around, so if you drive all the way down, all the way to the outside of Howard’s house, then you just get stuck. You get stuck, so people don’t come here. 

“Nice of you to call,” Tony says, thinking maybe he’s being too bitter. It wasn’t Obadiah’s job to take care of Dad. They were hardly even business partners anymore, Dad hoarding his company shares while Obadiah headed the actual company, Howard throwing his money at alcohol and hiding the rest away like a nest egg, like he could take it with him into the grave. Because certainly, Tony doesn’t think Howard really planned for it to go to Tony. It just sort of does, because he’s the only heir, even if maybe Howard forgot that in the lapse of judgement he had, lasting long enough to finally off himself.

Briefly, Tony wonders if this is a business call rather than a personal one. Then, he feels guilty. His dad is Dead. Obie wouldn’t call just to ask Tony to sign everything over. Not yet, anyway.

“Tony,” Obadiah says, and he sounds a little hurt, and a little uncomfortable. Like how people sound when they find out someone distant to them has died, and they aren’t really sad but they feel like they have to pretend to be. Tony can’t really blame him. No one was close to Howard. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Tony says. He thinks he’s a horrible person, saying it’s fine. His dad is dead, and it’s his fault, his fault. And Tony says it’s _fine_ because he’s a fucking waste of breath and he didn’t know how to help him, he didn’t know how to take care of him. He didn’t try hard enough, and Howard is dead and maybe Tony’s even a little relieved and that’s a whole thing he can’t let himself think about right now.

“Are you. . . How’re you holding up?” Obadiah asks, and Tony almost wants to laugh.

“Me?” he says, “I’m fine. Jesus, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m great.”

It’s a little too much and he realizes that, but just a second too late. 

“I know it must have been hard for you, finding him like that. But, I. We’ve known it was coming for a long time,” Obadiah says slowly. Like that makes it any fucking better, and not a hundred times worse. That everyone knew Howard was nuts and was gonna off himself and holed him up with his waste-of-breath son, knowing full well he wouldn’t be enough to save Howard from himself. 

Like everyone knew that Tony would do such a bang up job looking after his own dad that it was just a matter of time before he popped a cap in his brain.  
  
“Don’t say that,” Tony says.

“Say what?” 

“That it was always going to happen like this, don’t, just, d-don’t.” He has just the right balance of shame and pride that he can’t admit why it bothers him so deeply, but he also can’t handle hearing it. He isn’t sure why he’s behaving like this. He feels detached. He realizes that the duration of the phone call, he’s been pulling at a loose thread on his comforter. The stitching falls away in sections the harder he pulls and it’s satisfying, the perfect, repetitive motion.

Obadiah sighs, like Tony is a child, like he doesn’t know what to do with him; it’s familiar. “You know that it’s true,” he says.

“It isn’t,” Tony snaps.

Silence.

“It isn’t,” Tony says again, more quietly. And then he gets his shit together because if he doesn’t lighten up, Obadiah really might worry that Tony isn’t fine (he is), and he might come down here and be miserable the whole time and then Tony’ll have to thank him for visiting when really it’s the last thing he wants. “Look, you’re probably busy with the business, I won’t take up much of your time. You’re right. He was old. It’s not a shock, just kind of hard. But I’m really fine. I’m going to take care of the house until I figure out what to get to next. I don’t know if he left a w-will. But I’ll figure it out.” He says it like a child promising to clean his room up.

It’s apparently the right thing to say. Tony absently considers that there’s always a script for conversations like these. No one wants you to be not-okay when they ask you if you’re okay when bad things happen. They want you to be chin-up holding-up just-fine-thanks, and why bother asking if the only answer you’ll take is a positive one? What’s even the point?

“Glad to hear it,” Obadiah says, sounding relieved. 

Tony envies how detached Obadiah is from this. 

“I’ll call you,” Tony says. It’s code for _don’t call me_ and it also it code for _I won’t call you_ because Obadiah knows better than everyone else what a failure the only Stark son is, too nervous to pick up a phone even during good times. These aren’t good times.

“Take care of yourself, Tones,” Obie says sadly. “If there’s anything I can do—“

“Yeah, I know. Thank you, sir,” he mutters.

The phone call is draining and Tony picks at the loose thread for a few minutes even after it ends, and the corner of the comforter comes undone and the tiniest corner of old, white fluffing peeps out of the open seam. Tony pinches it between his finger and rolls it into a fibrous little ball. He flicks it across the room. It flies in a high arc and then lands somewhere too soft for Tony to hear, too small for him to see.

Just gone.

He doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be doing with himself, but he told Obadiah he’s taking care of the house and that’s what he did before, (just also the person in it too but apparently he was bad enough at that), so he decides to get his ass in gear and take care of the house. 

Wednesday is lawn day. Tony can hardly call it a lawn, but he gets outside in a ball cap and long sleeve shirt despite the sun and sprays water from the garden hose over the brown patch of dead grass near the mailbox. There’s a package, surprisingly. Tony almost misses it because it’s been dropped onto the curb instead of into the box, but sure enough, it’s addressed to him which he finds very surprising. Ever since dropping out of school, he doesn’t get mail.

He carefully coils the hose back onto the spool and turns off the tap before going inside with the package, a cardboard box with dented edges and the postage stamp shows the image of a dove and there’s a smiley Jesus-on-a-cross sticker and someone has taken the time to write Tony’s name in painstaking print.

It turns out to be from the church. 

There aren’t many landmarks in Deadwich. It’s a standard, middle-of-bumfuck-nowhere Northeast small town, miles of pine trees and corn fields, all most of the same thing. Howard chose to buy the house up here because he was paranoid, and the house is as secluded as it gets. 

_No one can get me here, Tony._

It’s ironic, that Howard ended up being the one to get himself.

The church is close enough to being a landmark, since it can be seen from almost anywhere in town. Located on a steep hill above a quarry, the steeple looms overhead like a colossus. Once a day at sharp noon the bell rings, a clanging, echoing reminder that Your Lord And Savior Sees You and You’ll Burn If You Don’t Repent. Baptists. Fucking Baptists.

Tony’s used to them, living up here, but he’ll never like or understand them. He’s never believed in any God.

The package is from the ladies group. Made up of wives of the mayor and doctors and pastors, capital R Respectable ladies with nothing better to do than sit in a circle and embroider religious images onto pillowcases while catching up on gossip. The gossip is vicious, far as Tony understands. He got a little taste of that when he first showed up again in Deadwich after dropping out to be with his dad. Hushed whispers and sharp eyes on him as his face burned in the grocery store, picking up Howard’s Scotch and cigarettes.

Inside the box he finds a care package and a pamphlet inviting Tony to church. _That’s the problem with Baptists_ , he thinks, as if there’s only one. They think church can fix everything. Tragedies are just excuses to pressure unsaved, grieving people into swallowing their pill, and Tony thinks it’s pretty disgusting.

Tony discards the pamphlet and rummages around the goodies, home-baked cookies from _Mrs. Susanna Gellar_ , and home-baked blondies from _Mrs. Joanna Peltier_ , and a note made up from scrap-booking supplies from _Mrs. Lilian Hardwick-Brown_ that reads “Sorry for your loss” in loopy, clumsy home calligraphy.

_Thanks for the snacks_ , Tony thinks. _Really worth losing my dad._

He doesn’t have the appetite for anything but liquor and he sort of resents the whole care package anyways, so he shelves the goodies in the kitchen and throws away the cardboard and the note. A few hours later, though, his stomach starts rumbling because he has hardly been eating, so Tony makes himself a plate of church cookies and a pot of black coffee. He doesn’t even drink until five PM rolls around, which he thinks is pretty good, all things considered.

He’s twenty-three. He shouldn’t be depressed and lonely, day drinking in an empty house. (It rings a little too familiar.) He rationalizes it as not ‘day drinking’ after the five PM mark, though, and pours himself whiskey into a plastic juice cup because dead or not, Tony doesn’t touch Howard’s nice crystal glasses.

He should shower, and shave. And change his clothes, and probably clean house, and call the lawyer because there’s a lot to attend to. He should probably make something to eat beside church cookies, but he can’t cook and can’t argue that he’s worth the time, effort, or cost of a real meal. A few shots deep, he sinks into the sofa and stairs at the mark on the floor where Howard’s chair used to be, the one Tony burned in the backyard. 

The wood around the spot is bleached lighter by sun and wear, the gleam stripped from the dusty floorboards. Except for in that one square, outlined in four corners by small divots where the feet of the chair had pressed into the ground for so many years. The setting sun falls in through a window and bounces off the one shiny spot on the floor. The spot where Howard died. Memorialized by a small piece of nonuniform floor.

Tony stares at it while the TV plays something that he isn’t watching, and thinks that it takes a real piece of shit to do this badly for a dead dad.

Someone knocks at the door.

Probably a lawyer, Tony guesses, setting his cup down on a coaster and standing from the sofa. As he loses his balance, he realizes that he has had more to drink than he noticed. The effects of the alcohol are more apparent standing than sitting. He wonders if the lawyer is here to tell Tony that they found a will. Maybe Howard hated him enough to write him out entirely. He imagines a man in a suit with mousy glasses and a clipboard on the porch,

_“Please sir, I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the premises in accordance with Mr. Stark Senior’s will. He has explicitly banned his piece of shit son— I assume that’s you— from ever setting foot in the old pile of junk ever again. Sign here, please, waste-of-breath.”_ And that would be the Stark way, cold and impersonal yet biting to the core of Tony’s self worth, twisting his insides into ribbons, he’d probably cry. Big baby.

He chuckles darkly under his breath and staggers to the door, unlocking the three locks one at a time, _click, clunk, thunk. W_ hen it opens, a cold draft ruffles his bathrobe. Tony is startled by the person standing there, earnestly clutching some kind of wicker basket, a whole head lower than eye-level.

A sprout of unruly blonde hair and a bird’s nose, freckle-dusted sharp cheeks. Knobby elbows and one of the weirdest pairs of sneakers Tony has ever seen. He connects two and two, this must be bread-guy from the other night, back again with his stupid fucking bread. Tony almost slams the door then and there, but too many seconds have passed and the little guy is blinking buggy blue eyes at him, pulling his long red coat tighter around himself. It’s cold outside.

“What—? What do you want?” Tony asks, gripping the door. He doesn’t think he sounds drunk. Maybe he doesn’t look great, maybe his hair is flat and greasy, and he’s wearing ratty sweats and his bathrobe is full of holes. But he doesn’t sound drunk as far as he can tell, so he counts it as a win.

“Hello,” he replies. “You never got your bread.” He thrusts the basket in Tony’s direction, motion stiff and determined.

Jesus fucking Christ. 

“I told you I don’t want your bread,” Tony says.

“No,” the other says, looking perplexed. When Tony doesn’t take the basket, he doesn’t stop holding it out. It’s awkward and forceful and Tony wonders why he doesn’t know how to speak like a human fucking being. “No, you told me ‘What the fuck’ and ‘fuck off’. But I didn’t know if you still wanted to try my bread so I brought some over. I’m Steve, by the way.”

“Is there something wrong with you?” Tony asks, gaping. A muscle twitches in Steve’s jaw and something flashes in his eyes.

“No. Why would there be?”

For a moment, Tony just looks at him. Between the weird, scrawny face and bug eyes, the long red coat, the bread basket, and the tie-dye sneakers, there’s a lot ostensibly odd about Steve, and that’s without his freaking weird mannerisms. His chest puffed out and this look about him as if he’s known Tony for ages.

“You look like little Red Riding Hood,” is what Tony ends up saying instead. This time, he maybe sounds a _little_ drunk. Steve tilts his head in confusion.

“I don’t understand,” he says. Tony snorts.

“The coat and the, the basket,” he explains. Steve still looks confused. Tony chuckles again. “Guess that makes me a wolf.”

And that idea is especially funny. Howard always called Tony a sheep and he was usually right, as much as they used to fight about it. He doesn’t know what to do with himself without someone showing him the way. Even after Howard started losing his marbles, Obie always was there to tell Tony what to do. Tell him when he was being an idiot. Sometimes it was kind of mean, but he was always right, it was always ‘ _for your own good, Tones,’_ and ‘ _I have your best interest at heart, you know_ ,’ and ‘ _do you really think you can look after yourself?’_

He doesn’t, for the record. The first time he was given something important to do, looking after his dad, he fucked it up big time. Tony’s no wolf. Tony is a worm.

Steve doesn’t appear to be unnerved by Tony’s sad expression or lack of explanation for his sad laughter. In fact, Steve doesn’t seem put off by anything about Tony, even though he’s a certifiable mess right now. 

Steve slowly smiles. “You’re a weird guy,” he says.

Tony takes the basket. Mostly, just so that Steve will stop holding it out like that. “Thanks,” he says.

“You didn’t tell me your name yet.”

“Tony,” Tony says. Steve jabs a skinny hand out to him and Tony doesn’t shake it. He isn’t trying to be rude, but there’s paint all over Steve’s fingers, and a bunch of bandaids, and he’s a weird guy so who knows what kind of germs he’s carrying.

He retracts his hand and looks a little hurt, but he keeps his shoulders very purposefully square. “Nice to meet you,” Steve says. He looks at Tony carefully. “Are you okay, Tony?”

“I’m fine,” Tony snaps, because everyone keeps asking him that. Everyone meaning the man at the funeral home, Obadiah, and now his weird neighbor who doesn’t even know Tony’s dad is dead.

“Okay,” Steve says.

“Okay,” Tony says.

Then no one says anything so Tony takes it as permission to shut the door. He hopes Steve will go away soon because it’s cold outside and Tony is too drunk to deal with this, and he’ll probably start to feel bad if Steve just stands there. Based on the brief conversation they’ve now had, it doesn’t even feel far fetched to wonder if the guy would stand out in the cold on someone else’s porch. Thankfully, Tony sees the outline of his baggy red coat disappear down the front steps, so Tony goes back to the sofa with a wicker basket.

He lifts the cover out of curiosity more than anything else. Nestled inside in a checkered red and white cloth is a loaf of dense, brown bread. Oddly, Tony feels less resentful of the bread than he does of the care package from the church group. He breaks off a corner of crust experimentally. Uses the bread to chase another swig of biting whiskey. It’s good, a little sweet, thicker than blood. Nothing fancy about it, and it’s on the verge of staleness since Steve has had it sitting around since he first baked it, but it’s good, humble bread.

Maybe it’s just because this baked good isn’t supposed to somehow replace his dad. Tony will never understand why people bake for people when there is a death. _Oh, your mom’s breast cancer finally got the better of her? Have an apple pie. Your brother got in a brutal car crash and had his spinal cord severed? I hear peach pie goes with roadway death._

All it does is taint pie, and it doesn’t make anyone feel better.

That being said, maybe it’s lucky Steve brought bread. Tony hasn’t fed himself properly since Howard died, and his bread is just about the only thing that doesn’t make him feel sick.


	2. Chapter 2

Tony subsists almost solely off of Steve’s bread for the next two days. It’s better than he’d like to admit, and he tells himself that it pairs well with whiskey. Tony does a shot when he wakes up to get himself in gear, and then he makes it through the rest of the day almost entirely sober, which is pretty good, he thinks. So what if he’s getting fucked up at five PM on the dot? It doesn’t matter.

He swirls his glass and downs it in one go, flicking on the TV. He tells himself that he’s allowed to mourn, justifies the drinking and the hiding away as mourning. His dad is dead, he can mourn. (He still doesn’t feel it, he’s a terrible son, a worthless fucking blackhole of a person.)

Except, it’s an argument that would sound better aloud, telling someone beside himself that he isn’t drinking too much. It’s just pathetic when it’s in his own head, because all that means is no one is left to care what Tony does to himself, and that he’s full aware on some level that he’s drinking more than he should be. Fully aware and denying it anyways. He feels guilty about it because there are things he should be doing, probably. He can’t quite think of anything in specific off the top of his head, but he thinks of how pissed Howard would be, Tony laying around, not showering, not going out or working, just fucking drinking with his feet up.

But he can’t go back to school, he isn’t smart enough anymore. 

Everything fell out of his head when he left. He had to delete everything out of his brain to make room for taking care of Howard. His dad was the kind of person that took up a lot of space, even skinny and old and sick. Tony was almost the opposite. He’d grown up learning how to make himself smaller, lowering his voice, lowering his shoulders, just trying to squeak by without pissing anyone off. Once he got past being desperate for parental attention, he moved into being terrified of receiving it. Sneaking around, trying to avoid Howard for as long as humanly possible as a kid. Skipping meals, playing sick. When Tony was called into his office on the rare occasion, his tongue would feel like a dead fish in his mouth and his palms would sweat and he’d run through the list in his head of every possible flaw that Howard might notice if he doesn’t get out fast.

Well. He hadn’t been wrong. The second Tony had been close enough for Howard to get a good look at him, that was that.

_Dumbass._

It gets dark outside, earlier than sunset because heavy clouds curl up on the horizon and block out the last few drops of sunlight. Looking out the window, Tony thinks the clouds look sort of like the pieces of cotton fluff that he found inside his blanket. Too dense to be called fluffy. Compact from a few too many rounds through a washing machine. It feels like it should rain, and he can hear in the distance the faint echo of the church bells knocking together in the wind.

Of course, by nature of the placement of the house at the end of the one-way street, at the base of several hills, all shrouded from the elements by brush and earth and whatnot, the wind doesn’t so much as ring the ugly wind chimes hanging from the porch next door.

Then Tony squints, and frowns. Wind chimes?

Those weren’t always there. He looks a little closer, drawing his attention away from the clouds and focusing on the house that he can barely even see through the window. As far as Tony knows, the place has sat empty for twenty years. Howard’s whole idea about this piece of shit street was that no one lived here, no one but himself. It reminds Tony of a frightened rodent. The empty house as far into the empty street as possible, back against the hills as if trying to burrow inside and hide in a heap of soil.

But the neighboring house is clearly inhabited now, and it takes Tony embarrassingly long to connect Steve to the house. Maybe his brain isn’t working at its peak, he thinks, glancing at his empty glass.

Hm.

Tony gets off the couch and puts his glass in the kitchen. He drags himself into the shower and washes the grease from his hair and boils off the layer of skin that’s been sticking to his sweats, which he hasn’t changed in days. It feels good to get into clean clothes, even if it’s just another variation of loungewear. He still looks like shit and knowingly avoids his reflection while he brushes his teeth, sticks on a hat, and goes outside, Steve’s empty bread basket clutched against his chest.

It’s disorienting to hear the wind but not feel it. He can almost imagine the phantom of it on his skin, and as he walks a few meters up the sidewalk to Steve’s place, he catches one odd gust. Behind him, he can feel his own house groan and creak until it passes. 

Steve has no doorbell so Tony knocks. Twice, loudly, he pounds on the door and then stands back.

No immediate response comes. Tony feels dumb for a minute, standing there with damp hair shoved into a cap, arms full of the dumb bread basket, staring at the dumb wind chimes. He feels dumb because this was a dumb idea, and he’s dumb and pathetic to be in a position that he’s looking for excuses to shower and step outside of the house in the first place. And he wonders who the hell buys wind chimes, what could _possible_ compel a person to willingly purchase the godawful, eyesore noisemakers,

but then Steve answers the door, and there isn’t even the sound of a lock coming undone which means the freak just leaves his door open, and there’s paint on his face and a pink apron tied around his petite waist, and Tony hears music playing somewhere inside the house.

Tony isn’t sure why he expected Steve to be weirdly glad to see him, but it sure as hell comes as a shock when Steve doesn’t smile and looks even a bit sullen. “Now isn’t a very good time,” he says shortly, shoulders drawn tight. Tony wants to laugh in his fucking face, but mostly just because he feels like a dumbass. _Of course it isn’t a good time._

He should’ve just left the basket on the step. “Sorry,” Tony says. “Just returning your thing.”

He sticks out the basket and Steve takes it immediately. “Thank you,” he says, then purses his lips, “It is a very bad time, for you to have come. I wish you didn’t come.”

Tony is too confused to even be offended because he can’t sort this person out, and he wants to ask why he talks like that, so precise and blunt and unnatural, but he doesn’t. He even feels a little bad, suddenly. Steve looks genuinely distressed. “Sorry, then,” Tony repeats. “Is everything. . . alright?”

It’s his attempt at what he thinks a normal person would ask. People check in, probably. Normal people.

“It’s not a good time. Thank you for returning my basket,” Steve says. He looks as though he’s trying to sounds grateful, but it sort of fails because his eyes grow red and his knuckles are white holding the basket. 

The door slams in Tony’s face. Huh.

It’s a whole new level of humbling. Tony wasn’t under the illusion, before, that anyone liked him. He wasn’t under the illusion that he was likable, even, for that matter, but subconsciously he at least ranked himself above Steve on the social scale, because Steve is a fucking weirdo, and maybe Tony felt entitled to Steve wanting to talk to him because Steve had seemed so lonely and awkward before. Except now, Tony has been rejected by the bottom of the barrel, and he wasn’t expecting to have some long, deep conversation, but it’s a whole new level of self-loathing, when the local whacko doesn’t even want to shoot the shit with you.

And then Tony feels like an ass for thinking of Steve that way because he doesn’t know him all that well. He is a whacko, probably. He has wind chimes. He doesn’t know how to talk to people.

But he’s a whacko who has better things to do than talk to Tony, and really, he shouldn’t feel so surprised. 

___

 

Tony decides to start cleaning out the house. He figures he owes it to Howard to get it done eventually, even if he was never around to actually enjoy it. There are good bones, under the dirty walls. Nice wood, good structure. Brick fireplaces in almost all of the rooms. When Howard was alive, Tony never let himself really explore. This isn’t the house he grew up in, after all. He doesn’t know it well. Not that he knows his childhood home well, either.

The house Tony was born into was a city house, cramped between the neighbors on either side, but still more luxurious than he ever had the presence of mind to be grateful for in the moment. He doesn’t remember it well now; he went off to boarding school when he was five, and he spent holidays at home sometimes but usually at school because Dad was always busy, and his mom died when Tony was still little.

Maybe it was raising Tony alone that scrambled Howard’s brains the rest of the way. As far as Tony can remember, his dad wasn’t always totally insane, and he’d been finished with his brief military career by the time Tony was an infant. Maybe it was raising his sorry sack of shit excuse for a son all alone while trying to run a business and grapple with whatever he saw over there that ran him down.

For years, it had seemed like a slow descent. Every time Tony saw Howard, he looked a little thinner in the face, a little sharper around the edges. But then, after Tony started college, it happened fast, like a drop off a cliff. The trip between ‘anxious’ and ‘delusionally paranoid’ wasn’t a long one, and he made the leap into incoherency overnight with the aid of a particularly deep drink. 

Tony remembers. There had been a nightmare. He’d called for Tony in the night— he never, ever called for Tony in the night— and when Tony came, Howard had broken a glass bottle to use as a weapon but there was no liquid spilled on the floor which meant he’d drank it all, before bed.

 

_“There’s someone there, boy, there’s someone at the window, there’s someone there,” Howard says, crouching in the doorway, grasping Tony by the collar. Tony swallows hard and takes a step nearer because he’s afraid Howard’s going to hurt himself with that bottle— but his bare foot lands on a shard of glass in the dark. He cries out in pain._

_Feels it bleed warm._

_“There’s no one there, Dad,” Tony says, biting back the bile that rises in his throat because he can hear the glass crunching under his flesh, in his flesh, and now he sees it glinting in pale moonlight, scattered around him._

_Howard’s eyes grow larger and he freezes, still with fear. He hears something that Tony doesn’t. “Someone is here, they found me.”_

_Tony is frightened. His father has nightmares but the ghosts usually clear away when Tony comes to set him right. When he looks at his dad, though, he can tell that he’s a thousand miles away._

 

Tony remembers that Howard hadn’t made any more sense the next morning, and that had been the breaking point. Tony had gotten scared and removed what he thought to be all the dangerous objects in the house. He hid his father’s gun, (though apparently not well enough,) and tried to be better at clearing out empty bottles before the paranoid old man could smash them to use as a fucking weapon.

He still has a jagged, lumpy scar on the sole of his foot. 

Anyways. Cleaning. He can’t start with Howard’s room. He isn’t sure if he can bring himself to even open the door, let alone go inside and disturb his dad’s things, so he bypasses it as heads straight down the hall. Finds himself in his own room, which he doesn’t really use. He’s been in the habit of sleeping in the living room for a long time because it is (was) easier to listen for his dad like that, and he pushes open the door to his space. It hardly looks lived in.

His shit is mostly in boxes, still. Like he doesn’t even live here.

He has to turn on the overhead light as soon as he opens the door because his room is pitch black. No windows. It isn’t a proper bedroom, even, and Tony can’t imagine what was going through the mind of the building planner when designing this room. Something halfway between a closet and an office, the ceiling slopes on one side and the floor is L-shaped, as though built around the corner of another, more important room.

  
Tony isn’t sure why he chose this room. He tries to remember if Howard told him to put his stuff here, or if Tony picked it out all on his own when he moved in. Either way, it’s hardly fit for a person, which makes it perfect for Tony. 

There are at least four other bedrooms, all sitting empty. 

On second thought, he turns straight around and comes back again with a plastic trash bag, a roll of paper towels and a broom. The door swings shut behind him even though Tony doesn’t touch it, and it startles him, he jumps and drops the broom, and all the noise in the otherwise silent space feels like a violent intrusion.

With the door closed, it’s a whole different kind of quiet. Tony feels closed in, he feels buried with no window. He feels like maybe, on the other side of the walls is a hundred feet of filthy flood water, pressing in from every angle, pushing and bending the boards with the crushing weight of the sea, and Tony feels one breath of stale air away from the walls exploding inward, drowning him in rushing water.

He shuffles to the furthest corner, around the bend of the ‘L’ shape and starts dragging the broom across the floor. There’s a lot of dirt. More dirt than he realized. Jesus, why did he let it get this bad? Was he so neglectful? Surely it wasn’t great when he moved in, but it wasn’t this bad.

Tony sweeps up a layer of the floor, it feels like. He breaks a sweat before he’s halfway done, even. It’s disgusting. The floor isn’t even the color he thought.

He briefly recalls every second he has ever spent, in the last two year, sitting around, watching TV or looking at a book, or smoking a cigarette in the back yard. Time taken selfishly for himself when he should have been sweeping this floor. Or any of the other floors. Or preventing his father from killing himself, maybe, at the very least. 

The argument can’t even be made that Tony isn’t to blame for Howard, because “there wasn’t anything he could have done”. That’s what people tell you, when a loved one kills themself. _Oh, there’s nothing you could have done._

Except there were things to do, for Tony to do. There were the pills, the antidepressants and the antipsychotics, that sometimes Tony would just forget to give Howard entirely, they’d just slip his fucking mind like some kind of careless idiot. And there was the gun, Tony could’ve hid the gun better. Should’ve gotten rid of it altogether.

It takes him too long to sweep and his realizes he has nothing to scoop up the dust with. His hair sticks to his forehead with sweat. His hands shake. He turns off the light and goes back downstairs, calling it a night on the cleaning. He pours himself another drink and he thinks he doesn’t deserve shit because he can’t even stick to anything for long enough to finish a job. Can’t even sweep a fucking floor right. 

The kitchen counter is gross, covered in his empty cups and garbage, and the fruit bowl doesn’t have any fruit in it but it’s full of mail, bills and shit that he never got around to opening. The knife block has a spider web between the handles of two large knives. Tony never cooks anything, and God knows Howard never used the kitchen, he never cooked even before he went nuts.

Tony slowly unsheathes a knife, breaking the fine web. There’s no spider. Maybe after it made the web, it realized that this is a shit place to live and crawled off through a crack in the plaster. It’s probably just dead. _No place for living things_ , Tony thinks, looking at the dull blade, wondering if it would be sharp enough to really hurt himself with.

Not even mice live here. Ghost town.

He replaces the knife into the block because he wasn’t really going to hurt himself, he was just wondering, the same morbidly curious sort of way as when you stand at the edge of a bridge and look over a rail and think about falling down. 

___

 

Steve comes back, first thing in the morning. (Noon, first thing in the morning, same thing.) He raps crisply three times out of the door, jarring Tony from sleep, flailing awake on the couch, a string of saliva running from the corner of his mouth to his pillow. He wakes with his heart in his throat, why does he always wake in a fucking panic?

He lunges out of the sheets in a tangle around his ankles, toward the door, clumsily undoing the locks, _click, clunk, thunk_.

“Jesus Christ, it’s fucking bright,” Tony says when the door swings open. He squints, bringing a hand up to shield his eyes. It feels like the sun is a knife in his skull. 

“Hello,” Steve says.  
  
Tony is stricken by the urge to say that now isn’t a very good time. He doesn’t. He’s such a dick. “Hi,” he says, voice still scratchy from sleep. Half dreams swirl in his head like a drug not fully cleared from his system, 

Steve squares his shoulders and speaks very deliberately, “I came to apologize for being rude,” he says. 

Tony is definitely glad he didn’t make fun of him, then.  
  
“You don’t need to,” is what he says. 

“You just caught me at a very bad time,” says Steve, and Tony wonders what was going on when he came. Maybe he’s supposed to be curious, maybe that’s the whole thing. 

“Yeah, I got that. It’s really okay, buddy. I was just dropping off the basket.” And then Tony sees that Steve is holding the very basket in question, the corner of a purple cloth poke out. It occurs to Tony that he didn’t return the checkered red and white cloth when he dropped off the basket; it’s still sitting somewhere in the kitchen.

“I made another batch of bread, here,” he says. Tony takes the basket into his hands. 

“What’s this for?” Tony asks, suddenly suspicious. 

“I think it’s important to be kind to your neighbors. Especially here,” Steve says. His voice goes hollow and his eyes seem to see something that Tony doesn’t; for a haunted moment, a chill runs up Tony’s spine, _what does he mean_?

Then, Tony realizes that Steve means the deserted neighborhood at large, isolated in the wasteland population of Deadwich. 

“Oh,” Tony says. He thinks that he’s used to being haunted here, he’s used to living with ghosts, and he’s certainly used to unkindness, and he kind of wants to laugh because if Howard was alive, no amount of warm-heartedness of the neighbors would matter to Tony. 

“You’re supposed to say ‘thank you’,” Steve says, and Tony nods.

“Thanks,” he says. Then, he says, “Don’t push it. We aren’t friends.”

“No wonder. Do you talk to everyone like that?” Steve asks.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Like, _that_ ,” Steve repeats.

“It’s funny that you’re criticizing how I interact with people,” Tony says. Steve frowns a little and Tony’s stomach drops.

“Why?” Steve asks, in all seriousness, mouth pressed in a flat line. Tony wishes he hadn’t said anything, because Steve looks about a stone’s throw from crying or punching Tony, because Tony’s being a fucking dick, but it isn’t his fault Steve is so weird.

The bread feels suddenly very heavy in his hands, and Tony notices that he can see the blue of Steve’s vein under the thin skin around his eyes, like an alien. “Forget it,” Tony says. It’s obvious that he’s backtracking, but Steve seems satisfied enough.

“Consider it forgotten.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is a WIP, so the title, tags, warnings, and description are all subject to change. I will add a note if chapters are re-edited as I go along because that is one unfortunate part of WIPs.
> 
> While I certainly have most of this story mapped out and intend to update regularly, installations may become sporadic in response to my class schedule. Please be warned that this piece will grapple with heavy topics, focusing on attitudes about death and grief from the perspective of characters with mental illness. 
> 
> Feedback makes the dream work, I would really cherish comments and kudos.


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